I work in IT, and we recently hired a new “Engineer” at my company. I noticed on the form that he claimed to have extensive knowledge of Python, so I decided to meet him. The first question I asked was what IDE he uses, and he replied, “Anaconda.” Before I knew it, he was referring to the entire computer as a “CPU” and struggled to solve simple issues on Windows. To top it off, he makes 30% more than I do.
(I work as a Level 1 Service Technician, and my boss is aware that I have experience with coreboot and GNU/Linux. I just got approval to bring my own setup with it installed. Although we work in a Windows environment, I can make it work.
I also funded and helped test a bunch of hardware for coreboot, with guidance from friends I have who are experienced in the field. However, I only make $55k per year, I’m hoping I can get a nice raise. It’s just my boss and I as the two IT guys, so maybe there is potential.)
I work in IT. I usually call my job “IT support” but I’m also technically the system admin, and network admin.
Today, I had someone ask me to delete a calendar for them in Outlook. It wasn’t a shared or special calendar, it was literally just a calendar in their normal outlook.
Bear in mind, they didn’t ask how to do it. They asked me to do it.
That’s a skill issue right there. I’m not in the business of doing other people’s work for them. Now and then I’ll entertain the odd request of “how do I do x” and show someone how to get something done, mainly because it’s a lot less effort than telling them that I didn’t go to university for teaching, and all three ensuing arguments thereafter, because there’s always arguments.
But this was straight up “do my job for me”.
Lol, no, I have my own shit to do.
“skill issue” ticket closed
The number of people who think that IT is supposed to know how to use every program and fix everything within those programs is a lot. I’ve had several engineers, programmers, designers, accountants, executives of who knows what consistently ask to fix their work or how to do whatever it is. I always try to point them in the right direction or help but other people in my field hate even that because it sets a precedent that the next time they need help they think they can ask again.
If I knew all of their jobs thoroughly like they seem to think, I wouldn’t be getting paid half what they are. I would need to be paid twice what they are, to support all of those positions in that way.
I’m a lot like you. For the most part, I try to look beyond the question being asked, and find the root cause. If the root cause is because of a skill issue, I’ll direct them to the next logical resource. If it’s not a skill issue, or I can’t determine that it’s a skill issue, then I’ll continue to test until I can make that determination.
9 times out of 10, if I find a solution to make a thing work in a program, I’ll share that with them, and let them take it from there.
A lot of the people I support are working in the finance space and my company has an entire support department for finance applications. I’ll either bounce the problem off of them, or just direct them to the finance support team for guidance.
This wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t even asking how. It was straight up telling me to do a thing for them, in a program they should know how to use. It’s not a complex finance program or anything, it’s literally Outlook.
Yeah, Outlook has a lot of little things that throw people. Just getting people to find the view settings they want is tough sometimes, and font size in outlook doesn’t change with the character size of the OS being changed. Automatically disabling com add-ons that are supposed to not disable by group policy do to “slow start times” of outlook. Online calendars are a mess, sync issues, filter issues, spam issues, the spam blockers within the admin console of o365. Convincing people to get rid of .pst files. .pst files not being compatible with onedrive, importing .pst files to their online archive (which is really just a second email storage on the back end). Takes forever, then half don’t import properly, then you get them to re-run it and maybe it works but you have duplicates. Deleted emails that need recovery a month after they realized they needed it.
Sometimes it makes me realize why companies push users to just use the Webapp, but there’s always something.
Didn’t even touch the distros or shared emails/calendars yet lol
Outlook is a long list unto itself of random crap that’s probably going to go wrong.
To be fair, it’s not like word or Excel are any less complex, but people tend to know those apps way better for some reason.
The Web version is taking over. Just like they did with teams, they’re starting a webview version of Outlook. They’re very creative this time, calling it “new Outlook” 🤦♂️
It’s all very dumb.
I completely agree on the view settings too. It’s like a world unto itself just to sort and organize a single view of Outlook. I helped one user the other day, who simply wanted to see everything as conversations. It’s an easy fix, and it wasn’t the reason they logged a ticket, but it took about 8 seconds and I was already connected to their system.
Do office workers not have a requirement to learn basic MS office skills anymore?
One of the things I had to learn quick working in IT was when to amiably tell a user to go pound sand. I’m a professional with my own work to do, not your personal assistant.
Whoa, I wonder how you worded that. Was it a straight up no? Lol
The short version is that I explained that we have a company policy that we are support, not education.
This is not a support issue because no technical issue is preventing the user from getting this completed.
Sorry if you need to learn this, but compensation has little to do with ability or merit in a lot of place that need to screen share.
Also, ability to screen-share has little to do with the competencies that pay the bills on most places.
I’ve had corporate VPs ask me to PDF Excel files because they don’t know how.
The very concept of pdf’ing excel files makes my asshole pucker up
It’s a fine thing to do if you’re trying to show someone your data without inviting them to change it, intentionally or otherwise.
Even in IT I find that with each consecutive job that I get, my wage increases while my workload decreases. I’m literally being paid more to do less. I don’t think it’s the same for all these professionals but I feel that once most people reach a certain level, they mentally retire from learning new things.
As someone who had to struggle in a meeting because I’d never shared my screen in Teams before and they put it in some weird place, I feel attacked
Microsoft: “Here, have some shitty arcane dysfunctional software.”
Me: “Damn, this is hard to use.”
IT Guy: “Damn, I can’t believe you get paid to work here.”
Also IT Guy: low whisper “Fuck, they moved the button again. This is going to take me a minute.”
The amount of people who spend 0.12 seconds trying to figure shit out before throwing their hands up and saying “this is impossible, I can’t find it” is wild. Every time I use a new program, I go through it with excruciating depth, changing settings and finding how to do things. It usually takes 5 minutes or less.
The people who are just immediately helpless are the ones being bitched about here.
This, when I’ve got a new program or a program has updated I take my time to familiarise myself with it, it takes me more than five minutes because I’m visually impaired and have a learning disability, but it doesn’t take that long and I have fun exploring the program without pressure.
But when a program updates the UI the morning I start work and I realise I’ve got 5 minutes to figure out where everything has moved? It’s overwhelming and unfortunately I have a “freeze” response to stress and it took me years of therapy to push through that gut instinct to freeze up and just stare at it feeling like it’s too much and I can’t.
That said, I do still really struggle to find the button mid-meeting. I can vamp, but I can’t vamp while properly searching my screen because with my visual impairment that takes too much concentration, so the result is “okay I’m going to share my screen, but my UI has updated so everyone go refresh your coffees while I hunt down the screen share button” and some helpful person will try to explain where the button is, not understanding that my screen doesn’t look like there’s because I have adaptive software making things larger.
Though a few times I’ve logged a ticket to IT saying “I’m sorry, I know the issues exists between keyboard and chair on this one, I can’t for the life of me find the print button” and they’ll remote into my machine and say “oh, that’s because you’re enlarged font has pushed half your toolbar off the screen entirely. You’re missing a bunch of features” and suddenly it made sense why I felt like my co-workers were more efficient in these programs. Unfortunately they couldn’t fix it so I still have to work around only being able to see half the screen of this program they suggested “returning everything to the original aspect ratio and getting better glasses”
My boss seems to think our little 2 man IT department can fix Adobe’s bad adaptive UI.
I have an ongoing theory that every time you locate what you’re looking for in a Microsoft project, a random number generator determines if it will be moved, and where to
My god all these admin centers and their old and new versions. Four places to do any one thing and maybe one of them has documentation that’s up to date.
There are at least three locations to disable user accounts. Two of them require a setting of “True” and the third one “False”. Drives me mad.
If you find it too fast you won’t see the ads they’ve imbedded in their menus.
It’s not hard to find the camera button
It would take less time than the bitching
Same, always used Google Meet, was forced to use teams. It took me a second to find the right button while rambling about it. Being a Mac I also needed to enable the permission and restart.
I haven’t used Zoom in a while either, it would probably take me a second as well if it’s not obvious.
the giant share button at the top was too obvious?
My company switched from webex to teams with no transition time, the first 10 minutes of most meetings for a few weeks was “Am I audible?”, “I’m not sure how to share my screen”, “I started recording, you’ll have to unmute yourself again.”
It was agony, but it wasn’t due to anyone’s incompetence.
nah, thats normal lol
The sheer volume of people I’ve encountered through numerous jobs that are on high wages but lack basic skills astounds me.
They have other skills you don’t have, that are more important for those high paying jobs.
Like faking genuine interest in the shit their higher-ups blather on about, convincingly laughing at racist and misogynist jokes, backstabbing their peers when a position opens up, and doing the most demeaning tasks with a smile and a “thank you”.
“Soft skills”
They have other skills
Press X to doubt
Don’t forget rudely asking the flight attendant to bring another warm moist hand towel as I have spilled my pre-flight mojito.
I thought you’d go a different route and I was ready to fight. But yes. This sums it up pretty well. I quit my last job with a (roughly translated) “you’re an idiot, go fuck yourself. I’m polishing up my vita” and it was SO great.
Some millionaire in my office: “Hey, Sanctus, what’s my password for my computer again?”
Me, who can barely afford to fix my car: fights the urge to use a letter opener as a weapon
That’s a really long password no wonder they forgot it.
Well, I know what my next password will be! (Please don’t hack me)
Sick entropy, though.
Depends, if you treat the individual letters sure but if you look at the words as the atom of information most password crackers wouldn’t take long.
There are ~100 symbols on the US keyboard, many not permitted in a lot of online passwords (stupidly).
There are 11 words in the “passphrase”. Fight, letter, open, urge, weapon are not in the 100 most common English words. Urge is not in the 1000 most common English words (let alone fights vs fight, or opener vs open).
I think it would be a fairly strong password. You can reduce the entropy a bit by predicting likely next words in a sequence, but that would be defeated by adding some non sequitur(s). “fights the urge to use a letter opener as a scooter” or something.
Capitalization, intentional typos, spaces or not, ending punctuation? There a for sure ways to improve it as a password while still keeping the easy to remember, easy to type aspect. Overall it’s a great strategy to teach people for making passwords.
Horse battery staple moment
Correct
Those do make good passwords though. Had a company switch from 10 characters including special, caps, numbers lower upper requirements to 15+ with no requirements because it still would end up being harder to crack. Started using phrases where you could even put spaces, but in all lower case for me if was much quicker to type
Tangerine$45 is much harder for me to type than whatthefuckamidoinghere
I think it’s because I have to pause to think shift 4, then hit 4 and remember if my fingers are still by the 4.
All just examples but the standard keys… Are all automatic for me because of use.
Got me, haha. Thanks for the laugh.
“Sorry, that’s above my pay-grade.”
I don’t blame anyone for forgetting their password—it’s a dumb system, having to memorize 100 separate 16-digit randomly generated base64 codes that change once a month. However, I do blame them for not using a password manager, and I do blame them for making their problems other people’s problems.
Ours isn’t like that at all. They dont even have to change it every three months. The insecurity is crazy here and they still can’t remember the same password they’ve had since before I started working here.
Forcing password changes too frequently is actually a security risk, as it encourages bad practices like re-use, iteration, keyboard walks and writing the passwords down.
There are reasonable limits to impose on this, and educating users with demonstrations such as haveibeenpwned have been highly effective in my experience.
However, I do blame them for not using a password manager
Managing the passwords in your password manager becomes a job in and of itself when you’ve got enough of them floating around. My office is on year two of trying to do automatic password rotation for the myriad of service accounts in our systems. Anything that’s not Active Directory integrates is a headache. And even the ones that are have to constantly stay ahead of the Microsoft Updates curve or run into security problems of all sorts.
It would be cool if everything could be SSO, but you need to have a certain amount of faith in your OS to accomplish that.
I was against you until password manger. good save. I login to dozens of systems every day, I remember 2 passwords, all others are 16 character gibberish.
Your password is “giveMeFuckingRaise!1!1”
“Oh yeah, no wonder I keep forgetting it”
I work on a team that teaches courses on how to use specific programs. I’m at job level 1. A job level 3 guy keeps asking me to schedule meetings with him so I can teach him how to use the specific programs so then he can do the job he was hired for and teach other people how to use these specific programs.
time to switch places.
Sounds like you’re doing a job level 4. Time to get paid, brother.
In my line of work your competence does not get you promotions, but who you know and how well you fill out standardized tests that haven’t been updated since the mid 90’s. I’d have to change industries haha
Bruh, I’m not one for office drama, but I would recommend keeping records of that if no-one else knows he’s doing that to you.
Oh no this isn’t unusual behaviour. In my time here I’ve found this is the norm on many teams. I’d say 60% of the teams I’ve worked on here are like this.
The people with the worst virtual meeting presences are the VPs and above. They expect us to shovel their shit. Like, buy a fucking mic and a light, pay for more than DSL broadband, and shut the fucking door so I can stop hearing whatever your teenage asshole kid is doing.
EDIT: FWIW managers at most levels aren’t much better, they live by the example set by the superiors they so idolize.
Yes, networking skills are more valuable than service desk. It’s amazing how many service desk folks have a chip on their shoulder because they never moved on.
networking skills are more valuable than service desk
Only true until you drop your laptop. Then the value of that service desk work skyrockets.
Would be very cool and good if IT folks weren’t constantly in a dick-measuring contest and could see the forest for the trees. Maybe we’re all getting underpaid, relative to the suits six floors up, and we’d do well to stand by each other instead of bickering over who works the hardest.
You can tell you self whatever you need to hear. I can find a good service desk guy easy. Good execs are hard to come by despite the reddit/lemmy circle jerk.
I dunno, having worked both sides of the fence i would say whilst network skills are more valuable because the barrier for entry is higher, in that you need apecialist knowledge, the general knowledge a service desk tech is not to be underestimated (im talking those techs that actually fix and attend jobs as opposed to those on the phones)
The number of problems a tech can fix and the amount of work they get through can be astounding. sure, it’s something anyone can be trained to do, but to say it has inherently less value, i dont agree. i do networks in a hospital, and the number of people who appreciated the work i did when i worked the desk is vastly larger than the number of people that even know i exist now.
It felt alot better getting a bit of software working or replacing hardware, or recovering someones emails etc that got a doctor or a nurse working again and lowered their stress levels and made them smile than it does to upgrade cisco call manager from version 1 to version 1.1…
I agree to an extent that its not harder to work the service desk, but i dont think you should look down upon them. We all have an important role to play…
Except execs… they can fuck off.
I had basically the same experience at my last job. I worked my way up on the service desk and after a few years basically everyone in the IT side of things new my name. I probably had more general knowledge of how to get things done in that place than just about anyone. Obviously I didn’t have access to do a lot beyond general troubleshooting myself but I’d assisted with enough issues to know who to talk to and what info they’d need. Eventually I moved to an app support team and I hated it because it was more meetings and talking to vendors and trying to coordinate shit with other teams. I went from basically a constant stream of doing shit for people and getting their gratitude in return to waiting weeks on end to even get simple tasks through. My self esteem nose dived because I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything and all I got from others was requests for updates on things I was waiting on other people to do.
This hurts how accurate it is.
I am constantly worried i am not doing enough whilst simultaneously getting mad that i have to wait for vendors and review/approval meetings to make the tiniest change.
When im most of the way through something and i just need someone in apps to make a small change, I’ve got all this steam and im almost done with the task but my priority is not their priority so it stops. And a user ibwas helping is now left hanging. And i can’t do anything.
If the pay was better i would go back to the desk.
If the pay was better i would go back to the desk.
Same, what really pisses me off was our help desk had a “lead” position that was on the same pay scale as the app support role I moved into and was basically my dream job of handling escalations and more difficult issues and developing process (which I was pretty much already doing) but without the inbound calls, unfortunately the last time that position was open I was still in the “cooldown period” after getting promoted to a senior role so I wasn’t eligible. Then the next time one opened they just got rid of it. The only guy that was left was a massive POS too that never got anything done and the managers all acknowledged that I was working circles around him even with my normal responsibilities on top of it.
I guarantee you they know nothing about setting up a home network much less configuring a router.
